Dangers of the translation period

July 11 2025

I recently watched Fallen Leaves on a flight to Chennai. What a wonderful movie — depressed people talking about love and life in a depressed manner, and yet finding their peace in the end.

A few lines of dialogue caught my attention towards the end of the movie. The main character is solving a crossword puzzle when she utters the meta-linguistic clues out loud:

“Danger.” Six letters.
Threat.
“O positive.” Ten letters.
Blood group.

The above lines are from the English subtitles that I was reading, but Fallen Leaves is a Finnish movie. I wondered how the subtitle translators shifted between cultures when writing the English subtitles for these language-specific clues, so I naturally looked up the original Finnish subtitles:

“Vaara.” Kuusi kirjainta.
Uhka.
“O Positiivinen.” Kymmenen kirjainta.
Veriryhmä.

Kuusi and Kymmenen are the cardinal numbers six and ten in Finnish. But the Finnish word for bloodgroup, Veriryhmä according to the subtitles (and Google Translate) is 9 characters long. However, Finnish plurals are frequently formed with the -t suffix, and the captions might have missed the plural, or the character might have simply said the singular. But, what about Uhka which is just 4 characters?

It is at this point while writing this blog post that I realized she’s solving an English crossword puzzle, and just reading the clues out loud in Finnish🤦🏾‍♂️. So much for getting excited about an interesting translation puzzle in the wild.